A New Slant on Vision Research

The brain's visual cortex contains neurons that directly encode the
viewing angle of objects seen by the eye according to a news
release from the University of Minnesota. Researchers found that
whether test subjects were
looking at faces, cars, or meaningless geometric objects, their brains
responded in a way that indicated "there are separate populations of
neurons, each responding to a particular narrow range of orientations".
Once you see an object, these neurons encode it and then recognize it
instantly from any angle. These viewing angle neurons are likely located
in the lateral occipital
cortex. Tests with images of faces showed that the sujects were not
responding to the geometric arrangment of local facial features such as the
nose and eyes in the way most face recognition software does. The
research was
done by Sheng He
of the UMN
Vision Lab along with Jody Culham of Culham
Neuroimaging Lab.